Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Davidson goes on to say that purported psychophysical laws are like “All emeralds are grue.” They combine terms taken from disparate vocabularies. We may talk about emeroses and grueness, or about emeralds and greenness, but not about both at once (at least not if we want a useful comprehensive theory). Even so, we may talk about actions and beliefs, or about movements and neurons, but not (comprehensively) both at once. But there is an obvious sense, in the former example, in which we are talking about the same things, whichever set of predicates we choose. Even so, Davidson says, in the latter case. The difference in choice of vocabularies is not a mark of the difference between the real and the ontologically disreputable, nor of that between the factual and the mythical, but is on all fours with the difference between talking of the activities of nations-as-such and talking of the activities of ministers and generals, or between talking of mitochondria as such and talking of the elementary particles they contain. We may usefully and truly say things like “If Asquith had remained prime minister, England would have lost,” or “If there had been a few more neutrons in there, the mitochondrion would not have survived,” or “If we had just stuck in an electrode in the right place in the cortex, he would never have decided he was Napoleon,” or “If we could get hold of an emerose, we should have just the right shade of green,” but we cannot (so far as we know now, at least) deve...

November 29, 2020. Page 207.